I know that a lot of people on the right are savoring the demise of the newspaper industry, seeing a reliable bastion of liberal thought go down the tubes.Â I happen to feel the opposite way- some of my favorite things I have ever read have been in newspapers, and I’m not sure that the medium of blogging will be as effective in making sure that this level of writing is given the audience it deserves.

Here are 5 reasons why I think I will really miss the demise of the newspaper industry:

4.Â Postures in Public, Facts in the Womb, by David Brooks at the New York Times.Â This was written in response to Democratic candidates’ expressions of support for partial-birth abortion rights in 2007

I also like Thomas Friedman, George Will, and now Ross Douthat, who will be joining the NYT as a columnist next month.Â I hope another business model can be developed , such as collections of locally-oriented blogs with different emphases, that will allow people to go to one place and read good writers while keeping apprised of things going on in their area.Â Maybe Google Reader more or less serves that purpose.Â In any case, I really believe that good writing — like any good art — should be paid for, and I worry that the Internet will not be as effective at bringing good writing to the masses as the newspaper industry was for us and those who went before us.

I truly hope that newspapers can adapt and survive. As I leaf through my commonplace book, I note that newspaper articles are more numerous than any other source for the kind of contemporary thought and moving writing that I want to return to again and again — and thank you for the links to some of your favorites, which I will enjoy exploring in a moment.

I think the demise of newspapers would be a disaster for society as a whole, and for the blogging community. Most of what circulates on the blogs as news is really a spin on what the traditional press has uncovered. Without true journalists to uncover those stories and facts, blogs slide further into the mudpit of meaninglessness.

While the broadcast media may pick up the slack nationally, should newspapers vanish, I don’t know what there is to pick up the slack locally, which is really most important to the day-to-day lives of most of us. With the exception of a few national newspapers of record, I think newspapers should concentrate on local events and issues that we cannot get from any other source. I have a loyalty to my hometown papers for those local news stories, although I never read (inter)national stories in the paper anymore.

Our local paper was bought out by a national syndicate about half a dozen years ago. Most of the local content immediately vanished. It is now nothing more than a bunch of AP stories and a few local stories, none more than a few column inches long. Gone are the wonderful article series that spanned a whole week, the investigative reporting, the local cultural stories, the human interest stories, etc. But last week they did have a front page story on how Bristol Palin broke up with her boyfriend. Gag.

Unfortunately, good reporters just don’t exist like they used to. Investigative journalism has become the realm of 20/20 and Nightline.

I really liked the good old days when the newspaper was an actual record of the community’s happenings. Nowadays, birth announcements and obituaries are paid classifieds, the community calendar appears only in the online version of the paper, and the entire daily paper is maybe 20-30 pages, half of which are ads. This is down from 50 or so pages and far fewer ads, just a few years ago.

Sadly, the New York Press is now only a shell of its former self, but Crispin Sartwell was certainly never one of its ornaments. It was obvious at the time that all his arguments applied with equal or greater force to the completely vacuous George W. Bush, whose inability to recognize or deal with reality infected large parts of the country.

The death of newspapers began well before the rise of the internet. Competition from internet sources is only a very partial explanation for newspapers’ current poor health; clicking hyperlinks while sitting at a desk is a slow, poor substitute for scanning whole sections while sitting on the couch or eating lunch. There was a time my family subscribed to three local papers (only one of which is still printing) and enjoyed aspects of all of them. Today for some reason, I often question whether subscribing to one is a waste of time and money. The problems of newspapers lie in themselves.

I know that a lot of people on the right are savoring the demise of the newspaper industry, seeing a reliable bastion of liberal thought go down the tubes.

I don’t think this is true. I’d guess that most people on the right are as depressed about newspapers closing shop as those on the left. Sure, conservatives have their bogeymen and women, but I’ve not yet heard any rumblings about the New York Times being shut down, and I’ve never heard conservatives get all that worked up about the Rocky Mountain News.

Much of the decline of newspapers has nothing to do with journalism per se or liberal/conservative content. Instead, it is tied into the rise of the internet — in part, because of the information sources online, but mostly because the ‘net has gutted the major sources of income that pay for newspapers, namely commercial (quarter-page, half-page, full-page) and classified advertising. Those were the cash cows that kept newspapers afloat, and they’ve been vanishing for some time now.

This is why moving online doesn’t necessarily help a newspaper; it still has to pay for itself, and it faces the same competition for commercial and classified advertising that it did before.

On top of all that, many of the consolidations and purchases in the newspaper industry involved assuming massive debt loads, so even those newspapers or newspaper chains that otherwise might be profitable are crushed under debt servicing.

â€™ve not yet heard any rumblings about the New York Times being shut down

I had a bad feeling about the stock price of the NYT when I saw construction begin on their new world headquarters. A fancy new building is often a contrary indicator. The same thing happened with AOL-Time Warner.

So what does this have to do with newspapers ? They should be knocking on the doors of cable and satellite providers offering their subscribers exclusive access to the online versions of their newspapers. Thats right, the New York Times should be going to CableVision, Time Warner, Comcast, Charter, Directv, Verizon, ATT, Echostar et al, and offer to each that for 25c per month for those subscribers in the New York area, and for 5 c per month for those outside the immediate NYCity area, their subscribers will get exclusive access to the NY Times Online. Non subscribers will get what Wall Street Journal non subscribers get today, access to some content, but not the most timely or valuable content.

If the Times can convince these operators that their subscribers will find value in exclusive access to the content, particularly if they can become part of their basic or near basic service, then all of a sudden, the NY Times and any other newspaper finds themselves with a recurring source of revenue that can turn into real money, while at the same time offering differentiated value for the video distributors.

Thanks for posting this, Dan. It’s a good reminder that newspapers aren’t all bad. Even so, I haven’t gone to a newspaper for news in more than a decade. Since each of the articles you have posted are online, it’s not clear to me what is lost by eliminating the newspaper.

The old model gave newspapers a monopoly on the detailed coverage that most people saw, and newspapers abused that responsibility for decades. That’s why, even as far back as the 1970s, distrust of the news media (print and broadcast) was rampant. The new model provides individuals with alternatives, and allows people to see multiple sides of the same story.

The Dan Rather episode several years ago illustrates this beautifully. Twenty years ago, people who claimed the Rather’s source documents were forged would have been written off as whacko-conspiracy theorists because nobody would have covered them. Thanks to the demise of print and broadcast news media monopoly, Dan Rather was actually held accountable for his lies. Still, it’s startling that for more than 10 days, all major news media outlets refused to cover the indisputable facts that proved the documents to be forgeries, and it took more than 14 days for the old-school media outlets to actually acknowledge that there was a problem with the documents (as opposed to simply reporting “allegations”). By the time the old-school media picked up coverage, their participation was totally irrelevant, because nearly everybody had already come to the conclusion that Rather’s documents were forged independent of the coverage of the old-school news media.

The old, one-sided, cover-your-ass approach to the news is going the way of slavery and communism, and the fewer copies they print of The New York Times, the better the quality of news that most people will enjoy. I’m no more nostalgic about the heyday of newspapers than I am about the good old days before doctors used anesthesia for surgery.

A few matters, like the Dan Rather thing, can be handled by bloggers, but they lack the ability to cover most national and nearly all local matters. There was an article that got a bit of attention “In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police.“

There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn’t anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.

It seems that economies of scale winnowed out the several competing newspapers that cities used to have, and now the monopolists are failing in their jobs.

John Mansfield, the economy just won’t support a permanent underclass aimed at reporting local issues. I take this to mean that the news they report just isn’t very important to the locals who are supposedly impacted by the events.

Besides, I’d much rather have local police spinning things in their favor with impunity than major network anchors trying to sabotage a national election by publishing stories based on forged documents.

Besides, Iâ€™d much rather have local police spinning things in their favor with impunity than major network anchors trying to sabotage a national election by publishing stories based on forged documents.